30 May 1434, evening
The field armies cut off
About 80 metres from the league’s wagons the vanguard stops and turns, and the men from the wagons attack the pursuers. The league’s rear guard, the Plzeň landfrýd and the Rožmberk men, strikes them from behind and bars the way back to their fort. Many try to surrender. “There was no time for taking prisoners, only for killing,” the men of Plzeň write on 1 June.
The lords’ horse breaks into the wagon fort of the field armies, illustration by Věnceslav ČernýWikimedia Commons, Věnceslav Černý, Public domain (Bitva u Lipan - rozražení hradby.jpg)
At the same time the hidden horsemen ride in an arc to the field armies’ fort, overturn eight wagons where it stands open and break in. Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini writes that the defenders had never before seen horsemen inside a wagon fort. Prokop the Great and Prokop the Lesser are killed fighting on the wagons, and Jan Roháč of Dubá is taken prisoner. Jan Čapek of Sány and Ondřej Keřský ride off to Kolín with the horse, and the last groups give up at about 8 in the evening.
Čapek’s horsemen leave the field, a detail of Luděk Marold’s panorama of the battle, 1898Wikimedia Commons, Luděk Marold, Public domain (Zmatený útěk bratrské jízdy.jpg)
Czech historians put the field armies’ losses at about 1,300 killed in the battle and about 700 prisoners burned that evening in the barns of nearby villages. By Piccolomini’s account the prisoners were called into the barns with the promise of pay for further service. Two foreign accounts give the league’s losses as 200 or 500. The written sources hardly mention the Orphans’ field army again.
Sources
- Petr Čornej, Lipanská křižovatka (1992).
- Bartošek of Drahonice, Chronicle, and the letter of the Plzeň men of 1 June 1434, in František Šmahel, Die Hussitische Revolution (2002), vol. 3.
- Stephen Turnbull, The Hussite Wars 1419–36 (2004).
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